AI use becoming more localized, according to Gemini data from Southeast Asia | Heavy AI use in a company increases hiring, not layoffs | Winners of the AI Film Festival awards | The inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson | Helping users recover from errors | AI drones help replant the rainforests | Annotations seem a simple feature, but are often designed wrong | Token use is going through the roof with agentic AI

How AI “skills” are reused and other usability issues with skills | User research job listings for junior staff dry up, and senior staff need AI experience to be hired | Data comics generated with AI increase student learning | Quick view as a shortcut for seeing product info | The AI economy has $175 billion in revenue | AI use spreads from peers | Automatically creating advertisements based on a website

In 1993 and 1996, I predicted that user interfaces would abandon commands: computers would infer and execute user intent instead of obeying point-and-click orders. Modern AI delivered that paradigm, 30 years later. Scoring the papers’ 23 specific predictions against 2026 reality produces a decent grade: 71% correct. The biggest hit: language as the primary interface. The biggest miss: I predicted expert users, and AI instead became the great equalizer.

AI agents expand user tasks | Agentic AI makes expertise more valuable, not less | Users need control over the complexity of AI results | Constraints help users | Meta launched a new image model, Muse Image | ByteDance upgrades its image model to Seedream 5 Pro | Comparing the leading image models | GPT receives a major upgrade to v. 5.6 Sol

Progressive disclosure puts the few features that serve most tasks on the first screen and defers the rest to a clearly labeled second level. The pattern has 4 decades of evidence behind it: novices learn faster and err less, while experts pay 1 click. It’s about to matter more than ever, because AI answers and long-running agents need layered revealing even more than settings screens do.

UX benchmark for AI | Being mentioned in AI answers drives subsequent user behavior | Cheaper character design workflow for new video | AI maturity model | My hero: Dr. Stuart K. Card of Xerox PARC | Microsoft FDE

Halfway through 2026, AI is evolving faster than expected, but usability is struggling to keep pace. I graded my 18 predictions on autonomous agents, compute shortages, and interface design to separate the hype from reality.

Can humans remain in control with superintelligent AI (ASI)? | Dark design music video redone | What are normal people saying about AI? | My hero: Dr. John M. Carroll of IBM Research | Finally, a hotel room shower makes it easy to adjust temperature | How designers use AI vs. what they say about AI | Explosive growth in use of agentic AI among non-developers | Check whether major AI models know you

AI is too large to understand through a single analogy. The Internet explains early adoption, human history explains the next 30 years, biology frames longer-term speculation, and Norse mythology reminds us that tools are not gods.

Dark design patterns | 8 usage patterns for ecommerce search | Search engine traffic drops rapidly | AI overcomes “The Mythical Man-Month” | AI does well in UI design vs. human designers | The story of Ada, Countess of Lovelace | Scenario for European AI until 2031 | Virtual girlfriends/boyfriends rack up double the use of dating apps | Job openings for data visualization design

DeepMind outlined 4 paths to superintelligence: scaling, paradigm shifts, recursive self-improvement, and multi agent collectives. I explained this dense 57-page report in a 31-page comic book, including a section on the UX implications.

Gen Alpha is not mini-Gen-Z | Personas as Packaged Software | Sentient Design is a new book about AI as a design material | My hero: Dr. Thomas K. Landauer of Bell Labs/Bellcore | YouTube’s Thumbnail Generator | Recommended AI short videos | Amazon changes the name of its AI shopping assistant from Rufus to Alexa | Claude Fable 5 released

Reviving the UX goal of empowering users | Writing in marketese kills marketing | Supposed impulse buying is often the result of months of building consideration | Honoring a human factors pioneer, Dr. John D. Gould of IBM | Prompting tip for small text fields: use Chinese

Advanced AI work is not a simple prompt-response loop. Users discover their goals through experimentation, interpret machine output through boundary objects, and refine intent over time. The future of AI-UX is not chat, but structured discovery.

The two most conversion-killing ecommerce usability fails | Social media use remains strong but the platforms are becoming less about connecting with other people | The usability of overseeing AI agents | Team-building image idea: design video game characters | Professor Ben Shneiderman was one of the greatest early pioneers of user experience | Seedance 2 as PC software concept